They got done in by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data.

I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.

I also believe this is totally just a case of "billing and metering is hard, and may actually be a larger engineering effort than your actual service".

I was just looking at them earlier today since our Github actions are slow AF, and while they sounds great, this tells me it'll cost me more time to make sure I babysit it than most other trials.

With most of these, they end, the service stops working, and you have a choice to make: (a) it was worth it sign up, (b) not worth it revert.

There's no rule that domain names expire unless you renew them, at least for ccTLDs. It's just a convention. Conventions lead to assumptions, and assumptions can be used to scam people.

In general there's two types of businesses: businesses where you pre-pay (e.g. McDonalds), and businesses where you post-pay (e.g. a sit-down restaurant). If you take a conventionally pre-pay service and apply post-pay pricing to it, you have yourself a perfect scam.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1bnjus/the_austri...

> By providing payment information, You authorize us to charge Your credit card for usage fees or, in the case of invoice-based contracts, agree to make timely payments as specified in the invoicing terms.

Unless this guy had a larger contract and requested to be billed via invoice, this is a violation of terms and he should tell them to stuff it.

1. I'm not sure if blacksmith offers larger runners, but you if you're using them you have checked that bigger runners are worth the squeeze? A 2x runner does not mean a 2x faster build - I had a goal and sized CI according to that.

2. Caching. Nx can do this for your TS, provided your code is decomposed into packages.

3. At a previous job I had a post-run timings job. GH markdown supports Mermaid; I used a gannt chart to express it. I don't remember if the GH api supports getting timing for the current wf - so it may have been a second workflow.

The first is just a little legwork, the rest your agent should be able to do in 5 minutes.

And they are from Helsinki so big plus for anyone from Nordics.

Also, can the author tell us how much this would have cost on GH actions?

Interesting question, and I think it makes sense they’ve chosen to be pragmatic.

However, I wonder if Blacksmith get bitten in the arse by this. Hopefully that changes their behaviour but, like many startups, they might simply fail.

So I suppose the trick becomes to keep using the service without getting locked into it until it becomes clearer whether they will succeed or not, then perhaps you can consider taking advantage of platform features.

Even then, I don’t know how much I trust Blacksmith or would want to make it hard for myself to move away from them.

And on GitHub actions: Microsoft are very good at owning the platform and then making products and features that are just useful enough that it’s not worth switching to a better alternative but absolutely no more. GitHub Actions is an obvious example, Teams is another, but the list is long. To me it reads as a more modern variant of the anticompetitive behaviour of the 1990s. It sets up enough of a barrier to keep others out, and kills innovation. I’m not a fan.

However, I can share what we did to ease on our GitHub Actions bills if it helps.

Effectively we have our own runners hooked so that a job is scheduled, a runner picks it up and goes with it. We still use GitHub Actions but our monthly bill is now flat because we pay for a server. It is about 6x cheaper if not more.

The solution is not open source but it boils down to a Go service that orchestrates firecracker vms. All the vms are pre-warmed so there is always a fresh supply of workers to pick jobs of various sizes.

It is basic and it works. We have not had any issues since deployed.

The runners can be anything from 1 cpu 2 GB to 64GB 8 cpus. We can add more worker types in a config file.

I am not exaggerating when I say that we used to pay 1000s per month for this. Now our bills are in the range of a few hundred. Other dev boxes are done in the same way.

> While amusingly as of June 8 Blacksmith’s terms implied that their right to bill you is contingent on you providing payment information, a SaaS app certainly could have terms that obligate users to pay for unexpected overage when on a free trial.

> And let’s be clear: our agents run a lot of CI jobs, so we did expect to hit the limits of the free plan. We used the service and got value for it. So it’s not inherently dishonest, just surprising. My read is that they can do this.

So I read this that the terms say "blacksmith will only bill you if you provide payment information" but then they say that blacksmith can bill you if you don't provide payment information. That seems to contradict the terms, which I would assume underlie the "contract" that you agree to when agreeing to the terms.

I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the service, we've eaten that cost and always will.

There's a bit of an implicit policy decision on our side here that we did a bad job of communicating - I want to clarify that, and then talk about how we can fix it.

First, we wanted to let customers start using Blacksmith without a credit card. Very few infra startups do this today - CC validation is great for anti-abuse - but doing so has let us support a much greater number of free users.

Many of these free users have turned into full OSS sponsorships (most recently ccusage, and before that, OpenClaw) or large paying accounts, and we haven't wanted to cut those users off from trying us. It's a real pain point to find a credit card to put down for your company or OSS project's CI spend before you've even tried the service.

Second, not having a credit card on file means we don't actually know when credit card-less users intend to continue past their free trial.

Shutting down users CI workloads entirely seemed harsh, especially because doing so would fail builds and require a code change to resolve. If users could start without a credit card, we weren't going to then hold their runners hostage. Instead, we decided to just eat the cost for the small number of users who either abused our services or did not actually mean to use the service.

This worked, mostly - though every month we have gotten a number of support cases with users confused about their invoice. If they didn't intend to use the service past the free tier, we've voided out the invoice, and often given credits against a future bill if they intended to use the service, but were surprised by the behavior.

We have a lot to improve about our billing mechanics - but because our retention rate for these users has been so high, we have assumed great support could catch and resolve the ambiguity.

That said, there's two changes we can make now:

1. we clearly missed the mark on supporting this specific case - we should have offered to void this bill entirely given the surprise factor here.

2. We're prioritizing up making progress on a Wallet implementation that will let folks choose to suspend their runners rather than let them continue to run after they use up their free tier.

We also just launched a new billing/metrics view so users have better visibility into their free tier and Blacksmith usage.

I'm sorry for the bad taste this has left in everyone's mouth - I'll be hanging out here and on greg [at] blacksmith [dot] sh if you want to talk about your account specifically.

Where's the "grown explosively" bit coming from? Google doesn't have growth news from 2026, only early 2025.

Well, there are other drop-in GHA runner services, so I wouldn’t see why anyone would be tied into a specific provider.

Namespace.so are one and my experience with their support has been incredibly positive. Great team there.

Honourable mention to WarpBuild as well, who I used before them.

Can't believe they continued using the service after this. I would refuse to pay (they have no legal basis to require payment, and their own terms of service seems to disagree with their behavior) and find a more ethical provider.

It was disappointing to see -- I've used Depot in the past and will stick with them where possible.

The argument of "like many early startup do, we oversaw this and ignored that" doesn't really make it better.

And for anyone who hasn’t used bare metal instead of over provisioned VPS for services the performance gap is noteworthy and substantial. Yeah, there is some risk because you have to worry about outages, upgrades, and configuration but for something like CI where there’s near zero data loss risk… it seems well worth it if performance of your CI/CD infrastructure is really an issue.

But it's interesting that the only real difference is that they let you proceed without putting your credit card info in.

Go get a $20 gas station credit card. They get THAT card, and whatever name you want to provide.

When they demand $x000 for their free trial, they get.... $20!

And before anyone bemoans their 50+ page onesided "contract" that weasel-words revokes 'free trial'... Sure, they can publish a claim and sell off a debt to "John Q Public". We can see how far they'll get with that.

In Europe it's perfectly normal to be bound by terms of a paid service. I would never expect to avoid being liable for payments for services rendered only because I didn’t enter a cc number before exceeding free-tier limits.

Even in the comments below people are stating that this bill is valid only if they want to continue using the service.

Either say one month free and end after that, or end after the free data amount. If the customer finds value they will sign up and be less likely to look at their credit card bills.

This just pisses people off and puts the cost front and centre so they can't ignore it.

You'd think the YC mentors would give advice like "Don't be a dick to your potential customers".

Also I'd tell them where to stick their invoice.

The least-resistance path out of such a bad equilibrium is regulation. And they did add a lot of protections in the last decades, which probably helped too. Some would say places like the EU even added too many. But I'm pretty sure that "if you're using our product, you need to pay" would fly even in the most customer-friendly jurisdictions today.

Lessons learned:

1) When you spam your users with too many emails (engagement! marketing-thinly-wrapped-as-transactional-information!), they stop reading your emails

2) Read your damn emails

...boilerplate...

...more boilerplate...

Terms... and conditions...

...limitations...

...liabilities...

well, that was one of the most disappointing conclusions that i have read recently.

i am almost more frustrated with this decision than i am with the billing shenanigans. please do not reward this scummy behavior.

Nothing to excuse

"Don't do this. It works, but I don't like it."

It seems like a perfectly cromulent business practice to me, unless they start suing people who didn't give them credit cards.

You use the service. You're told, after awhile, that you've racked up a bill. You keep using the service. You're told your racked up bill is bigger.

And yet, the reason you're using the service after the first bill is because you find it valuable.

You have two choices. Pay up to keep using it, or stop.

The fact that you decided to pay up to keep using it is actually, imo, a pretty good advertisement for the service.